Bad Behavior

“Mr. Brooks,” “Crazy Love,” “Ocean’s Thirteen.”

Kevin Costner and Demi Moore in a surprising new thriller.Credit TOM BACHTELL

Alfred Hitchcock used to complain about moviegoers who refused to yield to the pleasures of narrative. “The plausibles,” he called them—viewers who, rather than enjoying one of his stories about two ordinary people caught up in some sort of sinister affair, would nag at minor details or ask, “Why don’t they call the cops?” To narrative filmmakers, the plausibles ask the wrong questions and make the wrong demands. They should care not whether a thriller is absolutely consistent but whether it gives good, nasty jolts. “Mr. Brooks,” a new thriller starring Kevin Costner, is a challenge to the literal-minded. A local celebrity in Portland, Oregon, a self-made millionaire with a loving wife and daughter, Earl Brooks has a secret life: he is addicted to murder. Every now and then, over a period of several years, with excruciating guilt as well as considerable enjoyment, he has gone out at night and committed a perfect crime. He has a superb enabler—an alter ego (William Hurt) whom he calls, for some reason, Marshall, and who accompanies him everywhere. No one else, of course, can see Marshall, and when Brooks converses with him people think that he is merely lost in thought. Marshall is Brooks’s desire, his madness, and his sanity, too—the part of him that wants to kill people and also calculates how to avoid getting caught. Think of him as ego and superego rolled into one hyperarticulate pest. The movie, which was written by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon and directed by Evans, is so well made, and so compelling as a portrait of a man at war with himself, that, right up until the end, many people will probably be entertained by its intricately preposterous story. Perhaps the most surprising element is that the onscreen alter ego—normally a tiresome device—turns out to be a big part of the fun.

Kevin Costner, who is famously talented at playing athletes but often stiff, even monotonous and smug, when playing other roles, gives his best performance in years. As Brooks, he is formidable and distant at work, relaxed and authoritative at home, and sardonic and almost viciously funny on his late-night jaunts. Costner seems to be exploring aspects of himself that he’s never put on the screen before. His Mr. Brooks is a smart guy who’s good at reading situations and figuring out what other people want—a businessman’s skills, which the movie, in a mildly subversive turn, suggests might also make for a good murderer. Costner was obviously attracted to the expansive possibilities in the script; after reading it, he agreed to co-produce the movie. And he also loosened up, I would guess, because he got to play opposite William Hurt, now the most brilliant character actor in American movies. Marshall, pleading with his host to commit murder, is a roguish wit, seductive and amused, who knows that he’s being unreasonable but presses his needs anyway. Once satisfied, he becomes the ultimate kibbitzer—he doesn’t have to do anything but give advice and render judgment on Brooks’s criminal panache. Hurt, tucking in his jaw and alternating irony, sarcasm, and mockery, hits one spinning serve after another, and Costner hits them right back at him. The two have a fine time, as if they had been doing this routine for years.

Brooks has a peculiar adversary—a voyeur with satanic eyebrows (the comic Dane Cook), who photographed him killing a naked young couple. He blackmails Brooks, but he doesn’t want money. He wants to be taken along on Brooks’s next night out; he’s an aspiring murder junkie. Brooks has an even more formidable foe—a tough homicide detective named Tracy Atwood, played by Demi Moore in full battle mode as a woman fighting not only crime but a parasitical husband. Speaking of her character, Moore has said, “The rage Atwood has is something that I personally don’t like,” which is odd, since, in so many of her movies, rage is the main thing she has going for her. Moore is easier to watch when her roles (including Atwood) allow her to use explicitly what some people find intolerable about her—her desire to overdefine any given situation so that she can control it. The screenplay adds a third wild card, Brooks’s beloved college-age daughter (Danielle Panabaker), who may have murderous tendencies of her own. Twenty years ago, Evans and Gideon wrote the coming-of-age drama “Stand by Me.” Like Earl Brooks, they clearly have a talent for the dark side, and this movie, though it goes wrong at the end, suggests that Evans, as a director, should give in to it. The rhythm of the picture switches between long silent sequences, in which Brooks falls into a state of murderous abstraction, and the elegant notation of physical movement—a hand entering a frame, photographs burning in a kiln. Evans will never be Hitchcock, but he produces enough pleasurable tension to send the plausibles into a frenzy of disapproval.

In 1959, about the same time that Doris Day successfully defended her honor from Rock Hudson’s assault in “Pillow Talk,” an extremely pretty Bronx girl named Linda Riss fought off a married lawyer named Burt Pugach. He was thirty-two, Linda ten years younger. Pugach wasn’t much to look at, and his honesty, both personal and professional, was intermittent at best, but he had some money. He took Linda to “a cabaret in New Rochelle,” and flew her around in his Piper Cub. Trying to account for Burt’s appeal, Linda’s friends, in recent interviews, cite his exalted status in the lower-middle-class Bronx. He had a Cadillac! He had a plane! At first, Burt pursued Linda without telling her that he was married; he then produced a set of divorce papers, a forgery exposed by Linda’s mother. Through all this, Linda, resolving, like Doris Day, not to “give it away,” held out for a marriage proposal. Despite many further endearments from Burt, she agreed to marry a good-looking young man named Larry Schwartz, whereupon Burt hired three thugs to throw lye in her face so that the young man would no longer want her. This barbaric act, which left Linda nearly sightless, wound up tying her and Burt together for life.

The fascinating documentary “Crazy Love,” directed by the filmmaker and public-relations executive Dan Klores, is a real-world story, as redolent of the time and place as Dion and the Belmonts, in which possessiveness, stupidity, loyalty, and need are joined together in bewildering combinations. It’s as if some disreputable and unending liaison out of Greek mythology had arisen on the streets of the East Bronx to be celebrated not with poetry but with front-page headlines. Like “Capturing the Friedmans,” Klores’s movie uses media archeology to reveal the layers of untoward behavior beneath the responsible surface of American Jewish life. Klores incorporates still photographs, home movies, and stock footage, feeding them into extensive current-day interviews with the two principals, their friends, and a local philosopher, Jimmy Breslin, who says, “Nobody is as visibly insane as Burt Pugach and still not institutionalized.” But Breslin’s judgment is not quite right. Klores and his editor, David Zieff, hold a few surprises in reserve, one of which is that Burt is occasionally something more than a demented lowlife. Linda, now seventy, with a large pile of hair and dark glasses, seems a tough and practical woman; Burt, eighty, with a Mephistophelian goatee, comes off not as pathological but as exceptionally egotistical, wily, larcenous, and guilty. His love for Linda redeems him, and he knows it. One may be horrified by these two, or laugh at them, but both horror and laughter give way to amazement at the human talent for survival.

You can build a ship—maybe a whole fleet—in a bottle, but then what do you do with it? For Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Thirteen,” an enormous Las Vegas casino—the centerpiece of a new mega-hotel, The Bank, named after its egomaniacal owner, Willy Bank (Al Pacino)—was constructed on a Hollywood soundstage. This movie is certainly more hardworking than “Ocean’s Twelve,” in which Danny, Rusty, and the boys, lounging at George Clooney’s villa on Lake Como, barely condescended to speak their lines between drinks. The script, by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, is a revenge plot: Bank has swindled the gang’s beloved mentor, Reuben (Elliott Gould), so Danny and the others plan to louse up the opening of Bank’s hotel. Soderbergh assembles the elements of their complicated scheme—which involves magnetizing dice and creating an earthquake—into short, punchy scenes and edits them together at top speed. But, after a lot of buildup, not much happens at the climax. The casino set hardly gets explored. Soderbergh ends the movie with a few jokes, which is casual and neat but leaves you wondering whether the practice of making enormous movies about nothing isn’t a little mad. ♦

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